Tag: Chris Newman

Where was Chris Newman from, and where did he live?

During the Boo Frog era, when Chris and I were working round the clock trying to progress musically, playing show after show (I was constantly telling him, we can’t play more than twice a month in Portland, with the idea that we needed to space our shows out to keep the draw sufficient) – sending press kits and albums to record labels, trying again and again to book tours – I recall reading an article in one of the weeklies in which Chris was described as being a “fixture” in the local music scene and getting mad as heck. Of course, I had no clue at that time that Chris was a “fixture” by outside design.

In other words, Chris was not a “fixture” in Portland in the same way that, say, Tobi Vail is a fixture in Olympia. Some people want to be fixtures. We did not.

Later, in an online discussion circa 2013, Chris’ influence on Seattle music of the 1990s was dismissed by someone saying he “wasn’t from Seattle.” In fact, that wasn’t exactly true, either and the ways that Chris’ was dismissed or diminished were almost always things that could have been said about a number of Seattle bands. In fact Chris’ connections to Seattle were deeper than many of the bands that had been associated with the “Seattle sound.” I now doubt that these comments were actually genuine – I’ve come to learn that there’s been so much cover up around Chris’ music and its links to “grunge” – and indeed, so much cover up around grunge in general – that storytellers don’t really seem to care so much about the truth as about how well (or at least how persistently) they pull off their cover stories. I however, care about the truth, and there may be some who don’t know the truth. So let me take a moment to give the low down on where Chris was from, exactly.

1923 James Newman obituary
Stockton Evening and Sunday Record
Stockton, California
June 13, 1923

Chris was born in Longview, Washington, which is about 50 miles north of Portland. My research indicates that his family goes back 5 generations to this region. On his father’s side, his great great grandparents immigrated to Newburg, Oregon from Indiana. They were living in Yamhill County, just outside of Portland, by 1880. Interestingly, Chris’ father’s family line actually seems to have immigrated to North America from Wessex, England, in the early 1600s. They were Quakers and continued to be Quakers for about 300 years, before switching in the mid-20th century to a Pentecostal denomination, Assembly of God. I don’t recall as much about his mom’s side of the family but I do believe that she too, was born in Longview. That said, people didn’t always stay in Longview. Chris’ great great grandfather died in Salida, California. His obituary in the Stockton Evening and Sunday Records omits mention of his wife who had died nine years earlier and seems to leave out several of his children including Chris’ great grandfather, Lawson Henderson Newman.

The Newman family, by the way, lived in Newburg, Oregon. Chris’ great grandfather, Lawson, married in Illinois and then settled in Longview which is where Chris’ grandfather, Ogden Gould Newman, was born in 1906. They seem to have then moved to Portland, where they had a bakery (same as my maternal great grandparents in Minnesota, and during this same period of time, the 1920s) and then moved back to Washington. They lived in some interestingly named areas – like Rainbow (which was in Kelso) and Stella (just outside of Longview). Kelso and Longview are essentially the same “urban” area, but of course, in the early 1900s people didn’t travel the same way they do now. It is interesting that Chris’ first guitar was a Stella, giving to him in 1967 by his Aunt Sylvia. (According to Edmond S Meany’s 1923 Origin of Washington Geographic Names Stella, Washington – named after the postmaster’s daughter – was founded in 1880. The Stella guitar brand started in 1899.) So it is true that the Newman family has fairly deep roots in Longview, Washington (Cowlitz County) and in and around Portland, Oregon as well. But Chris’ father, Elton Harley Newman, worked for the Seattle-based Boeing company (again paralleling my Minnesota-born maternal grandmother – who was a Rosie Riveter at Seattle Boeing during the World War II – and who also worked in a sawmill in Newport, Oregon where my mother was born). Chris’ family seems to have lived in Seattle for much of Chris’ early elementary school period before Boeing transferred them to the Deep South – Mississippi and New Orleans – as his father was apparently part of a team working on the NASA space program. This was probably starting around 1963. When the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan show on February 9, 1964, Chris was ten years old, watching from New Orleans.

The family moved back to Longview about the time Chris was beginning high school. The kids at the school taunted and ostracized Chris, and I’ve already told the story about the music gear theft catalyst (almost certainly a set up) that sent him to boarding school in Canyonville, Washington.

Later, between the mid 1970s and into the mid 1980s, Chris’ family lived for some time in San José, California, and Chris was also back and forth from San José.

But Chris didn’t just live in Seattle as a child, he played music in Seattle regularly, going back to 1980, often staying in town for a week or two and playing a series of dates per trip. It does appear that there were deliberate manipulations done around Chris to push and pull him in different ways. He was clearly not wanted in California, especially Los Angeles – a place that I now know, was exploiting him. In 1984, when Napalm Beach was living in San Francisco, it seems like they were hired to play, but only as openers. In contrast, beginning in 1984, Portland had essentially built a playground – a Potemkin village – an enticing trap – with Satyricon and other clubs of that type. It was during the latter half of the 1980s that Seattle seems to have moved away from booking Chris’ bands, while he was distracted by playing in Portland, touring in Europe, and increasingly drugs like cocaine, and then heroin.

Seattle punk scene 1982

How Courtney Love writes songs

I increasingly think that Courtney Love writes songs in an intentionally deceptive manner, and that this is especially true of everything she’s done since, and including, Live Through This. The reason is that she’s hiding her involvement with some massive crimes, including the murder of Kurt Cobain and the murder of Chris Newman, and of course, she’s now after me and my daughter.

Courtney constructs elaborate scenes to in which you can drown. She makes you think she’s talking about something, or to someone, when she’s actually talking to someone else, or about something else. She uses a lot of vague “he, she, you” where it’s difficult if not impossible to figure out who she’s talking about. Maybe if you have specialized inside knowledge you can figure it out – I usually can’t figure it out – or I figure it wrong.

I have said that Courtney Love was a honeytrap. As far as I know, Chris Newman was the first person she tried to honeytrap. She was, at the time, only sixteen, so I imagine she had been put up to it, at least in part by her father, who is the person who provided her with the LSD that she came equipped with. He in turn was likely working with another entity which was probably CIA and music business. She later honeytrapped Kurt Cobain.

When I ran into the Hole song “Honey” I didn’t know anything about honeytraps outside of maybe seeing a very superficial version of attempted honeytrapping in James Bond movies. It wasn’t something I would expect would happen to me or anyone around me. In any case, I listened to the album Nobody’s Daughter when it came out in 2010, a year after Chris and I got together, and then moved on – but later, after I began to see the parallel patterns between Nirvana and Napalm Beach, specifically Cobain’s adaptation of Chris’ early 1980s equipment set up and also the way the bands seemed to follow each other’s live performances in Europe (a pattern that I now see also happened in Seattle and Portland) – I started to look more closely at a lot of things, like Cobain’s lyrics “I’m a liar and a thief,” for example – and I started to see evidence that Cobain was extremely troubled by the way that Chris was being cheated, stolen from, and lied to.

Once Chris and I got together, and as we began to recover Chris’ catalog, and especially as Chris worked toward freeing himself from heroin addiction, Courtney Love no doubt knew that one or both of us would eventually detect this pattern, and that it could result in legal actions involving Nirvana.

I’m not sure how long the whole scenario had been planned out, but it seems like Courtney Love had been laying the groundwork for a profound deception going back years. She had Chris believing that she had a huge teenage crush on him, that she wanted him to be “her first” lover. She had written him letters from Europe. She had told him at a party, in front of a number of people “I would have married you Chris Newman!” And after appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone, she greeted him from onstage at La Luna. So Chris had no reason to suspect she held any ill will toward him.

Anyway, after discovering this bizarre pattern with Nirvana and Napalm Beach, I ran into a video of Courtney performing this song “Honey” live on the radio, and I felt that it was a “message to Chris.” What I really felt was that she was drawing a parallel in the song between Kurt Cobain and Chris Newman, and assumed that if Cobain had been troubled by the situation around Chris, she too would have been troubled by it, being as she seemed to care about Chris. And that the reason she didn’t reach out to Chris was because she and everyone was being prevented from speaking freely, or associating freely with Chris and me.

I thought these things because I was missing some key pieces of information.

The first key bit of information I was missing was that Courtney was not an innocent teenager who wandered randomly into a scene and somehow ended up living in the Napalm Beach band house. Courtney Love was actually a honeytrap, both with Newman and Cobain. That fact alone changes everything, especially if you also accept the idea that Courtney Love’s job was to destroy both Cobain and Newman. And that is what I think the truth is.

Once again, at age sixteen, she may not have had full agency – but she continued to make choices along the same lines.

Courtney Love is not just a honey trap but she seems to be a manipulator or “gruber” of finance, meaning she moves money around to get things done, including assassinations. This is achieved by concocting fake files with the FBI and CIA.

The song “honey” was itself a trap.

How we write songs

Chris and I didn’t write songs like other people write songs because we didn’t have access to the language (aka code aka slang) that every other artist has been using, nor knowledge of the framework around which this language hangs – framework in which Chris and I were actually centered. The set up may be depraved but you have to admit it’s clever.

Other artists code things in layers – even coding nonverbal sounds, beats, and chord progressions. Chris and I had no conscious access to any of this and so we wrote in a more straightforward manner. That said, there is still some complexity. For example, Chris wrote the songs on his 1986 album Moving To And Fro generally from the viewpoint of a teenage boy or young adult – but in a song like “Monster” he was actually writing from the viewpoint of a disapproving adult commenting on this teenage boy who spends all his time “drawing weird pictures” and playing electric guitar. Chris felt the phrase “electric guitar” was quaint and old fashioned – like I might think of the word “hyperlink” as quaint and old fashioned. There’s a line in the song about “smoking acid” which is I think an old cliché about people who don’t actually know how LSD is ingested. And the bit about “big red eyes moving to and fro” is about being stoned on marijuana. In coded language, the “red eyes” would indicate surveillance. Chris didn’t have that in mind writing, but others might have it in mind listening, because their background is different.

I think sometimes Chris would put in lines that sounded good, where he liked the rhyme, but in which meaning was secondary. I remember asking him to explain a line from his song “Unworthy” – “Tell me something true, and if it comes from you, I will believe the truth is all you knew” – he tried to explain it, but I think it was hard to explain. I think the sentiment was that – this song being likely directed toward his second wife, Denise – he wanted to believe this idea that she was radically honest and her example could make him a better man. In reality, she was not what he thought she was. Chris tended to self-blame a lot, and to absorb blame from others, and I think part of this was his heavy church upbringing and part of it was his way of being courageous and taking responsibility for everything that went wrong in his life. But part of this line might have just been about the way the words rhymed and flowed together. Chris was very musical.

I wrote the same way as Chris, except that I tended to rewrite and rearrange and try out different words, etc, whereas Chris would write out a song fully formed. Both of us tended to write from personas or different parts of our personality and/or as characters. I have a song called “minivan mom” for example which was about how I was feeling, but not at all about who I was or who I thought I really was. I think the term for this is “implied narrator” – in other words, the narrator of the song is a fictional persona. This I think is pretty standard. Where we differ from other songwriters is that we were unaware of the strange structure that were were born into, the language used to describe it, and the layers of deception within or cloaking around the structure and the language.

It’s weird to have gone through college and gotten a Masters Degree in English, as I did, without having this basic information about the use of coded language in art and music. It’s weird to have slogged through pages of critical theory where all minutae of text is analyzed from every angle, without this ever having been overtly discussed. I imagine if I were to go back to these analytical texts I’d find the coded language in them as well – code language analysis of coded language texts with all these meanings and motifs being analyzed all the while the code itself is never overtly discussed. Trying to comprehend this – what appears to be a fundamental dishonesty in higher learning – is one of the many challenges I’ve faced in recent years. At first I thought that this was the most radical thing about the structure around us – the near complete co-opting of language and it’s deep integration into western art and culture. Now I see that there are bigger issues, like global genocide.

As for the language issue, I eventually concluded that the symbolic coded language must have become ever more deeply engrained because of the nature of the situation. It’s not something that must be the way it is – it’s something that is the way it is because it serves a function. Part of the function is entertainment, but much of the function is secrecy, cover up, or exposure – but coded exposure. Usually a planned (or in progress) crime is exposed too late for it to be stopped.

To a large extent the code is the way it is because of what amounts to violent suppression of free speech and expression, and rewards offered for participation in and cover up of crime. Artists have information about crimes they are not able to share. If they did share this information, nothing would be done to prevent the crime, and the artist might endanger him or herself. This suppression of free speech and the associated patterns of crime should be of great concern.

Another moment of reflection

Every once in a while I have to stand back and look at what the heck is going on here.

Initially, back in 2014, when I started I thought I was writing about an artist who had been unfairly ignored, or who may have burned some of his own bridges during a period of drug addiction. It didn’t take long for me to see signs of something far weirder going on. The response to this was, from the community and industry linked people alike, steadfast denial and pushback – including covert but violent – and ultimately deadly – pushback.

Nonetheless, people have a right to their own legacy, the fruits of their own artistic output, and the right not to be victims of crime, regardless of who the perpetrators are. Also, it became clear that if I did not push forward, the erasing machine would complete its task and not only Chris’ life, but his legacy and memory would be completely wiped. And that’s exactly opposite of what he wanted. He wanted to reach people with his art. He was tricked by what he saw as the community’s threat to withdraw what little support he enjoyed, and to shame him (or me) for expecting or wanting more recognition or reward than he had already received. Now this was all real, it was all scripted, and it was all coordinated as part of this plan to keep Chris sealed away in his corner, which they did, and that is where he was murdered.

Meanwhile, there are efforts out there to tell stories around Chris, but not in any way that will challenge the dominant narrative or have any kind of lasting influence. These are in publications that could easily disappear. Everything is designed to self destruct and disappear at a moment’s notice, and that is what had been going on.

It can be helpful to look at how these narratives are constructed. In fact, it can be helpful to look at how rock n’ roll narratives generally speaking are constructed. It’s increasingly clear these are almost always fairy tales which are concocted to teach people what to expect from artists, or from their own experience, or from the industry, should they wish to take this route. This is part of the financed cult-and-control system set up around celebrities.

Chris’ invisibility was concocted, not real. In fact, Chris was one of the most highly visible artists, but only in a covert manner which meant that he could not even see it himself, much less profit from it. Within this realm, Chris was highly controlled. A lot of this control was linked to CIA MKULTRA related research and technology – cult behaviors, mountains of drugs, hypnosis, lies, frequency based weapons, industry-wide blacklisting.

There are a limited number of scripts to work from with these rock narratives, and the fact that there are scripts at all is evidence of a coverup – or multiple coverups. This is one of those big crimes that is made of lots of smaller ones. The scripts include The Ugly Duckling, The Tale of Redemption, The Cautionary Tale, The Tale of Too Much Too Soon, etc. These are used to cover up CRIME.

The ugly duckling is someone who’s brilliance is not seen or appreciated at first, but then they bloom later on. The tale of redemption is a story about someone who gets set onto the wrong track and is headed for a fall but something or someone rescues the person and/or they are otherwise saved from destruction. The cautionary tale is the person who took the wrong road and didn’t survive (this is a tale that’s been pushed onto Chris and which he at times would internalize), and too much too soon is the concocted and often repeated story of Kurt Cobain. Of course, these tales get mixed up and combined in different ways – for example, Too Much Too Soon can either become the Tale of Redemption or the Cautionary Tale, depending on which direction it takes; the Ugly Duckling is a starter tale which can branch out into different directions, etc. And there are probably other scripts as well, the point being that these are scripts which are imposed onto artists – they are not reality.

And why would there be scripts like this? The primary reason, I’m beginning to think, is to cover up crime. Secondarily, perhaps the creators of these scripts think that they have some kind of timeless take home message or moral for the kids. But these scripts are weak, and more importantly, false.

Celebrities are presented to us for consumption like Roman Gods – larger than life, yet fallibly human.

I do believe that Chris Newman is a thread that when pulled sufficiently, threatens to unravel the entire celebrity system.

Matches: Tom Peterson watch, Cobain’s suicide shirt

Monica Nelson and the Jack London Trio
Monica Nelson (formerly of Obituaries) and the Jack London Trio
Ivan French banner Tom Peterson
Ivan French Facebook banner with Monica featured in profile image (Sept 2022)
Kurt Cobain suicide scene photo - left arm
Kurt Cobain suicide photo (April 1994)

The man’s face on Cobain’s watch, and on Ivan French’s banner above, is Tom Peterson.

Something I notice now, every time I see this image from Cobain’s suicide, is that when Chris was sent home from the hospital in January 2021, after his terminal cancer diagnosis, he arrived wearing a hospital gown with a pattern very similar to Cobain’s suicide shirt. On August 1, 2021, about three months after Chris died I was having such a terrible time with pain in the teeth to either side of the tooth 14 extraction site, I went to an emergency dentist. As I was walking to the dentist’s office from the bus stop, I saw a hospital gown with a pattern identical to the gown Chris had been wearing thrown into a pile of dirt near a highway overpass, along with a bunch of trash including food containers, masks, syringes, and a ripped up copy of Alcoholics Anonymous “Big Book”

August 1, 2021

Compare to this image from Peter Gabriel’s 1987 music video for Big Time

Peter Gabriel - Big Time stuff

See also: Matches: Live Through This (Sept 7 2022)

and A momentary reflection on the narrative and my research to date (Sept 7 2022)

Chris Chalenor

Chris Chalenor was a colorist for Dark Horse comics. According to fandom.com, “he colored several comic books in Dark Horse Comics’ Aliens, Predator and Aliens vs. Predator lines” and “provided original artwork for the Batman versus Predator trading cards” (https://avp.fandom.com/wiki/Chris_Chalenor). Chalenor was born December 10, 1963 and died in 2001 at the age of 37. What I was told is that he committed suicide after having been diagnosed with terminal cancer.

I first arrived in Portland in late 2000 and I never met Chalenor. However it seems he was among the crowd who frequented Satyricon in the 80s and 90s. When I began working with David Ackerman on his Satyricon photo archive in 2006, he would sometimes point out people in the club. Chris Chalenor was in a photo from the January 6, 1989 Nirvana and Mudhoney photoset. This roll was mostly photos of Mudhoney and Nirvana, with a few photos of people in the crowd. No photos on the roll, that I can recall, of Inner Anger performing, though a photo of Courtney Love shows her posing in front of their set list. I have the sense that the band name Inner Anger is a nod to occultist filmmaker Kenneth Anger and that he was (maybe still is) a channel for financing false reports to the FBI. Satyricon had a playground funhouse feel but seems to have been a magnet for occultists.

Here is the photo of Chris Chalenor at the Mudhoney/Nirvana/Inner Anger show (no one has ever identified, to me, the women in the photo)

Chris Chalenor flanked by two unidentified women at Satyricon, 6 January 1989
Satyricon – 6 January 1989

So I saw this photo in 2007, and David pointed out Chalenor, telling me that he’d been a comic book artist who had died young. Chalenor came to my awareness again probably around 2010 after Chris and I were together and I was trying to cobble together lost media archives from Chris’ past. One of the things I acquired was a DVD of a 1986 film (a video, actually) made by Neo Boys drummer and K Records associate Pat Baum. (I also, for what it’s worth, had a scan of flyer for the film, which described Chris’ music as “grunge.” That seems to have vanished.) Actually, it’s unclear if the video was completed in 86 or 87 – Chris was pretty certain it was released in 1986, but credits in the video say 1987. The full video which was on one of my many blown out media devices, was about 30 minutes long and contained a relatively lengthy section where Chalenor said a lot of very nice things about Chris Newman as a musician and artist.

Although I’d noticed a disturbingly high number of cancer diagnoses and deaths in Portland, it wasn’t until 2018 that I began to understand that people were literally being murdered with cancer induced by frequency weapons, including UHF frequencies from television towers, aimed at covertly placed piezo electrical biomedical implants, and also including weapons linked to the network of drones which is very obviously overhead at all times.

Peter Gabriel – Big Time – February 1987

A question I have – having just posted these images from the Big Time music video – I remember in this Pat Baum film, Chalenor wearing an outfit similar to the one you see in the middle image, in front of the close of of television snow – but I can’t be sure because I no longer have the whole video. He wouldn’t have had a bow tie but he may have been wearing white, black, and burgundy.

Holla ‘cross from the land of the lost
Behold the pale horse, off course

Wu Tang Clan – Gravel Pit – 2000